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This volume reviews the experience of 25 non-Asian transition economies 10 years into their transformation to market economies. The volume is based on an IMF conference held in February 1999 in Washington, D.C., to take stock of the achievements and the challenges of transition in the context of three questions: How far has transition progressed ineach country? What factors explain the differences in the progress made? And what remains to be done?
Macrofinancial linkages have long been at the core of the IMF's mandate to oversee the stability of the global financial system. With the advent of the economic crisis, the Fund has drawn on this research in order to contribute to critical debates on the nature of appropriate policy responses at both the national and multilateral levels. The current juncture offers a good opportunity to take stock of this body of research by IMF staff and to share it with a wider audience, particularly since few collections have been published in this area. This volume brings together some of the best writing by IMF economists on macrofinancial issues, and highlights the issues and approaches that have guided IMF thinking in an area that makes up an increasingly important component of the IMF's overall remit. The chapters in the volume fit into three broad themes: financial crises and boom-bust cycles; financial integration, financial liberalization, and economic performance; and policy issues relating to macroeconomic policy and the corporate and financial sectors-including domestic and external financial liberalization.
This paper studies Mongolia's experience of growth and recovery during the first decade of its transition to a market-based system and compares it with those of other transition economies. Mongolia, like most other transition economies, experienced a painful, initial "transformational recession" before the economy began to recover, with efficiency gains the main source of growth during the early stages of transition. Mongolia's transition process has been relatively smooth compared with other transition economies, probably reflecting the combined effects of some favorable initial conditions, coupled with the early adoption of appropriate adjustment policies and market-oriented reforms.
This paper presents a simultaneous assessment of the relationship between economic performance and three groups of economic reforms: domestic finance, trade, and the capital account. Among these, domestic financial reforms, and trade reforms, are robustly associated with economic growth, but only in middle-income countries. In contrast, we do not find any systematic positive relationship between capital account liberalization and economic growth. Moreover, the effect of domestic financial reforms on economic growth in middle-income countries is explained by improvements in measured aggregate TFP growth, not by higher aggregate investment. We present evidence that variation in the quality of property rights helps explain the heterogeneity of the effectiveness of financial and trade reforms in developing countries. The evidence suggests that sufficiently developed property rights are a precondition for reaping the benefits of economic reform. Our results are robust to endogeneity bias and a number of alternative specifications.
Was the recent decline in real interest rates driven by a diminishing natural real interest rate, or have we observed a long sequence of shocks that have pushed market rates below the equilibrium level? In this paper we show on a sample of 12 open economies that once we account for equilibrium real exchange rate appreciation/depreciation, the natural real interest rate in the 2000s and 2010s is no longer found to be declining to near or below zero. The explicit inclusion of equilibrium real exchange rate appreciation in the identification of the natural rate is the main deviation from the Laubach-Williams approach. On top of that, we use a full-blown semi-structural model with a monetary policy rule and expectations. Bayesian estimation is used to obtain parameter values for individual countries.
We demonstrate empirically that not all capital flows influence exchange rates equally: Capital flows induced by foreign investors’ stock market transactions have both an economically significant and a permanent impact on exchange rates, whereas capital flows induced by foreign investors’ transactions in government bond markets do not. We relate these differences in the price impact of capital flows to differences in the amounts of private information conveyed by these flows. Our empirical findings are based on novel, daily-frequency datasets on prices and quantities of all transactions of foreign investors in the stock, bond, and onshore FX markets of Thailand.
This book scrutinizes the last 15 years of exceptional growth in the Turkish economy, and presents a model for sustainable ongoing growth that has particular implications for other key emerging economies. The growth of the Turkish economy in the 2000’s was based on two integrated fundamental factors: fixing deteriorating dynamics and implementing further reforms to stimulate economic activity. This basic formula led to pleasing rates of economic growth, fuelled particularly by domestic private investments along with revived consumption and exports. Driven by political stability established by single party governments in the post-2002 period, an improved economic outlook helped Turkey enjoy...
With a combined population of more than 350 million people, frontier and developing Asia, which includes countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangladesh, is located in the world’s fastest-growing region and has favorable demographics. The countries share a number of common macroeconomic, financial, and structural challenges. This book addresses issues related to economic growth and structural transformation, as well as the risk of a poverty trap and rising income inequality.
In recent decades, the foreign assets and liabilities of advanced economies have grown rapidly relative to GDP, with the increase in gross cross-holdings far exceeding changes in the size of net positions. Moreover, the portfolio equity and FDI categories have grown in importance relative to international debt stocks. This paper describes the broad trends in international financial integration for a sample of industrial countries and seeks to explain the cross-country and time-series variation in the size of international balance sheets. It also examines the behavior of the rates of return on foreign assets and liabilities, relating them to "market" returns.
When does trade become a one-way relationship? We study bilateral trade balances for a sample of 18 European countries over the period from 1948 through 2008. We find that, with the introduction of the euro, trade imbalances among euro area members widened considerably, even after allowing for permanent asymmetries in trade competitiveness within pairs of countries or in the overall trade competitiveness of individual countries. This is consistent with indications that pair-wise trade tends to be more balanced when nominal exchange rates are flexible. Intra-euro area imbalances also seem to have become more persistent with the introduction of the euro, some of which is linked to labor market inflexibility. Reviewing the direction of imbalances, we find that bilateral trade surpluses are decreasing in the real exchange rate, decreasing in growth differentials, and increasing in the relative volatility of national business cycles. Finally, countries with relatively higher fiscal deficits and less flexible labor and product markets exhibit systematically lower trade surpluses than others.